(h/t Heather for the vid)
Bob Woodward has been attacking the White House ever since it looked like the sequester was going to happen a few days ago. To get more publicity for himself and for his book, he then proclaimed to CNN that he got into a shouting match with a high ranking Obama official and then in a subsequent email he was threatened.
That was the talk of the day all day Thursday, but after Politico published the email exchange Bob became a laughingstock. Even Bill O'Reilly admitted that Woodward wasn't threatened. Well, Woody followed this up with an exclusive Fox News appearance on Hannity Thursday night to further whine about how Gene Sperling was nasty to him in the email. He did try to make believe he was sounding objective to Hannity and as long as Woodward was trying to damage Obama, Sean didn't mind kowtowing to Bob. But almost immediately, Woodward tried to distance himself from his remarks about being threatened on CNN by saying that he never used language which could be construed as being a threat...or something.
Woodward: He was shouting at me, now I've known him for twenty years and I emailed back, I don't worry about shouts. He was really worked up and then he sent me that email apologizing, saying I'm going to regret taking this stand, now what we're talking about here is not a fact. He's not arguing with the fact because beforehand he said we're just not going to see eye to eye on this, it's an interpretation. Obviously he didn't like being challenged on this at all.
But, ahhh, and people have said that well, this was a threat, or I was saying it was a threat. I haven't used that language, but it's not the way to operate in a White House. As you know, when somebody says you're going to regret something, particularly somebody of power like Gene Sperling, he's not just a guy in the White House, he's the economic czar for the president.
Wow, he actually said that to Hannity, of all people. Maybe he thought nobody would transcribe his whine-fest. He most certainly did use that language. What a hack.
Here's what he actually said to Blitzer:
BLITZER: What was said? Yes.
WOODWARD: It was said very clearly, you will regret doing this.
BLITZER: Who sent that e-mail to you?
WOODWARD: Well, I'm not going to say.
BLITZER: Was it a senior person at the White House?
WOODWARD: A very senior person. And just as a matter - I mean, it makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, you're going to regret doing something that you believe in. And even though we don't look at it that way, you do look at it that way. And I think if Barack Obama knew that was part of the communication's strategy - let's hope it's not a strategy, but it's a tactic that somebody's employed, and said, look, we don't go around trying to say to reporters, if you, in an honest way, present something we don't like, that, you know, you're going to regret this. And just - it's Mickey Mouse.
Clearly he said he felt he was being threatened and even mentioned how uncomfortable he was with it all. Now with the email coming out he's backtracking like a mutha. As I said in an earlier post Bob Woodward is lying about this whole story to get some publicity. Wolf Blitzer even told his audience that he really didn't believe Woodward either.
Gawker writes this scathing article called Goodbye, Bob about the incident:
The baldness of Woodward's lie made it impossible for even the most wetbrained conservative partisans couldn't stand by him. Hot Air, the stomping ground of Michele Malkin, allowed that "it's a threat so veiled I can't see it." The Daily Caller's Matt Lewis wrote that Woodward "played" conservative media. The Washington Examiner's Byron York agreed that it "wasn't close to a threat."
--But the simplest explanation for this episode is that he wants people to buy his book about how the president is an effete asshole who's in over his head. How would one go about marketing a book like that, I wonder? During the entirety of the Bush Administration, Woodward made 11 appearances on Fox News Channel. Last year, he showed up 10 times. This year, he's been on three times so far. Guess where he's going to be tonight.
Yes, Bobby boy appeared on Fox News with Sean Hannity to hock his wares to the conservative rubes because they aren't much interested in things like facts. Apparently, neither is Bob.
Nicole Belle told me about Joan Didion's brutal NY Times Book Review piece on Woodward's earlier books:
The genuflection toward “fairness” is a familiar newsroom piety, the excuse in practice for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what “fairness” has too often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.[..]
To commit such Rosebud moments to paper is what it means to tell “the human story” at “the core,” and it is also what it means to write political pornography.
The hits keep on coming for old Bob.
